"We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries,while denying it any employment in our own country .... expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." -- Theodore Herzl (from Rafael Patai, Ed. The Complete Diaries of Theodore Herzl, Vol I) "
... it is the duty of the [Israeli] leadership to explain to the public a number of truths. One truth is that there is no Zionism, no settlement, and no Jewish state without evacuating Arabs, and without expropriating lands and their fencing off." -- Yesha'ayahuBen-Porat, (Yedi'ot Aharonot 07/14/1972) responding to public controversy regarding the Israeli evictions of Palestinians in Rafah, Gaza, in 1972. (Cited in Nur Masalha's "A Land Without APeople" 1997, p.98)
"I have learned that the state of Israel cannot beruled in our generation without deceit and adventurism."-- Moshe Sharett, Israel's first Foreign Minister and later a Prime Minister(p.51 Simha Flapan, "The Birth of Israel", 1987).
"The very point of Labor's Zionist program is to have as much land as possible and as few Arabs as possible!" --Yitzhak Navon ("moderate" ex-Israeli president and a leading labor party politician.) Cited on p.179 of Nur Masalha's A Land without a People who cites Bernard Avishai's The Tragedy of Zionism 1985 p.340
After the Palmach men left [Deir Yassin], the men of the [Irgun and Stern Gang] started a shameful massacre of the inhabitants...[The massacre] was carried out...when the village was in Jewish hands, and without the inhabitants having taken any provocative action..."Meir Pa'il, official Haganah observer on the scene, Yediot Ahranot, April 29, 1972)
"All of the killed, with very few exceptions, were old men, women or children. The dead we found were all unjust victims, and none of them had died with a weapon in their hands."--Eliyahu Arieli, Haganah member who arrived at Deir Yassin shortly after the massacre, O Jerusalem, Collins and Lapierre, 1972.
"There is no doubt that many sexual atrocities were committed by the attacking Jews. Many young girls were raped and later slaughtered. Old women were also molested."
General Richard Catling, British Army Assistant Inspector after interrogating several female survivors (The Palestinian Catastrophe, Michael Palumbo, 1987)
"Without them [the settlements] the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] would be a foreign army ruling a foreign population."-- Defense Minister Moshe Dayan (quoted in Geoffrey Aronson's Settlements and the Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations, Institute for Palestinian Studies.)
"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushu'a in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."-- Moshe Dayan, addressing the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), Haifa. Quoted in Ha'aretz, 04/04/1969
"... we have no solution, that you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wants to can leave -- and we will see where this process leads? In five years we may have 200,000 less people -- and that is a matter of enorous importance." -- Moshe Dayan encouraging the transfer of Gaza strip refugees to Jordan (from Noam Chomsky's Deterring Democracy, 1992, p.434, quoted in Nur Masalha's A Land Without A People, 1997 p.92).
"In 1948, we deliberately, and not just in the heat of the war, expelled Arabs. Also in 67 after the Six-Day War, we expelled many Arabs." -- Tzvi Shiloah, a senior veteran of the Mapai Party and a former deputy mayor of the town of Hertzeliyah. (Modelet, no.12, October 1989)
"We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." --David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978."Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories." – Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, former Prime Minister of Israel, speaking to students at Bar Ilan University, from the Israeli journal Hotam, November 24, 1989.
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